Notch's New Space Game Has A Real Title, And It's Not "Mars Effect"

When Notch announced that his new space trading game would be called Mars Effect, we thought he was legitimately parodying Mass Effect just because he likes to live dangerously. It turns out it was an April Fool's joke, but hey, it was still March 31 where we were sitting. We had our guards down. And we were drunk from celebrating April Fool's Day Eve.

Now he's revealed the game's actual name, and it actually makes less sense—unless you're a coder. "What happens if you try to read a 64 bit representation of 1 in a 16 bit system, but you get the endianness wrong?" the Minecraft creator tweeted today, with the hashtag "0x10c". That's apparently the name of the game: 0x10c. Though he might as well be speaking Klingon as far as we're concerned.

But it turns out many of the features described for Mars Effect are carrying over to 0x10c. The game's official site also details the story: "In a parallel universe where the space race never ended, space travel was gaining popularity amongst corporations and rich individuals.

"In 1988, a brand new deep sleep cell was released, compatible with all popular 16 bit computers. Unfortunately, it used big endian, whereas the DCPU-16 specifications called for little endian. This led to a severe bug in the included drivers, causing a requested sleep of0x0000 0000 0000 0001 years to last for0x0001 0000 0000 0000 years.

"It's now the year 281 474 976 712 644 AD, and the first lost people are starting to wake up to a universe on the brink of extinction, with all remote galaxies forever lost to red shift, star formation long since ended, and massive black holes dominating the galaxy."

Dude, seriously, that sounds bleak. Almost as bleak as the monthly subscription fee the site mentions they'll likely charge. Let us know what you think in the comments or on Twitter.